


to fight in silence

by glundergun (cleardishwashers)



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:27:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21659038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleardishwashers/pseuds/glundergun
Summary: repression! happy birthday jd ily!
Relationships: Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59





	to fight in silence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jdmara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdmara/gifts).



Mac feels it for the first time when he is fourteen years old and standing in front of his house and watching Jesse Brooks walk by. Something in his chest, tight and strange and warm. He ignores it, and almost a year later, when Jesse Brooks kisses him on his fifteenth birthday, he punches him square in the nose and runs away. He scrubs at his knuckles till the last vestiges of blood run down the drain, and he scrubs at them some more till the skin breaks and stains anew.

He meets a preppy rich bastard for the first time seventeen days after that, and he feels that same tight-strange-warm Feeling once more. It’s easily replaced with irritation, because the guy cannot roll a joint to save his life. Mac huffs and takes the thing out of Rich Bitch’s (long, elegant, almost  _ pretty) _ hands and rolls it himself. “I know how to do it,” Rich Bitch says with a frown.

“Yeah. Sure you do.”

“I  _ do. _ My hands are just cold.”

“It’s fifty-five degrees.” His dad had told him to never be contrary with a customer, but something about Rich Bitch and his involvement with the tight-strange-warmness in Mac’s chest is rubbing him the wrong way.

“It’s  _ windy,” _ Rich Bitch says, affronted. He pulls out a hundred-dollar bill. “Here’s your money, douche.”

“I just rolled your joint for you, but okay,” Mac replies, stuffing the bill into his pocket.

“Keep the change, then. I don’t give a shit.”

Mac is so blindsided by the fact that this chump has given him a hundred bucks for a single blunt that he doesn’t even learn the guy’s name. It doesn’t matter, though, because that night, Luther looks at him like he’s worth having around.

Rich Bitch comes back the next week, and he brings the  _ Feeling _ back with him. Mac has decided that it’s hate. He felt it around Jesse Brooks, who is very obviously a homosexual and therefore a sinner who Mac  _ has _ to hate, and now he’s feeling it around Rich Bitch, who’s— well, a rich bitch.

“I’m Dennis, by the way,” Rich Bitch says, a bit awkwardly (what was Mac expecting? The guy is the only one here who’s in his full St. Joe’s regalia after school— not that Mac and Charlie had ever worn their full uniforms during the school day, either), and the Feeling intensifies. Rich Bitch hands over another hundred and takes the baggie of weed. “My sister knows how to roll them. So… no need this time.”

Mac finds himself a little irritated at this guy’s sister. “Whatever. You want your change?”

Rich Bitch opens his mouth and then closes it. He narrows his eyes. “Nah. Keep it.”

Mac narrows his eyes right back. Dennis thinks he can narrow his eyes better? More menacingly? He’s an idiot. “Why?”

And now he’s thrown Dennis off his game, which is immensely pleasing. “Wh— are you serious? You want me to take my change back?”

“I mean, obviously not, but— are you really rich enough to be blowing a hundred bucks on weed every week?”

“Are you really poor enough to be selling shitty weed before you even hit sophomore year?” Dennis snaps back, and Mac glares at him.

“Fuck off.”

“Real creative.”

“Yeah, like you could do better.”

“God, you— Jesus Christ.” And then Dennis walks away.

Mac honestly doesn’t know how they become friends. But Dennis keeps buying more weed from him, and eventually they start smoking it together, and the next thing he knows, it’s New Year’s Eve 1999 and he and Dennis are smoking downstairs together instead of manning the bar and he’s learned to live with the Feeling settled solidly between his ribs. “Did you— did you ever think we’d end up here?” Dennis asks, and over the years Mac has learned to peer through the cracks in Dennis’s soul and see the insecurity lying behind his words. “I mean, I went to the  _ University _ of goddamn  _ Pennsylvania. _ I could— I could be doing anything.”

“Just think of it as a transition period,” Mac replies. It’s selfish of him, he knows it, but he wants Dennis to stay more than anything else in the world, even though the Feeling is most definitely hate and it’s stuck around for the past eight years and it doesn’t make sense that you can hate someone so goddamn much and still want him to stay. “You’re, like, not even twenty-five yet. You got time, buddy.”

“Yeah,” Dennis says, staring into his bottle. Neither Mac nor the Feeling like it when Dennis gets like this, all introspective and sad. Dennis could look at his flaws for days. Mac’s seen him do it. It’s not pretty.

“Cheer up, dude,” Mac tells him. “Look. C’mon. It’s a minute to midnight, why don’t we go back up to the bar and watch the countdown?”

“Let’s— let’s just stay here,” Dennis says. “We can do our own countdown, I mean, you’ve got your watch—”

And something in Dennis’s eyes is bright and fragile, like something made of the thinnest glass, and Mac can’t say no. Doesn’t  _ want _ to say no. “Nice. Okay. Fifty-four seconds to go. Shame we won’t get to make out with anyone, though,” he says, and the Feeling does a weird expandy-contracty-fluttery thing. He ignores it. He’s only got forty-six seconds of the 1900s left.

“We could just make out with each other,” Dennis says, and suddenly the Feeling goes haywire, looping and pulsing and God-knows-what-else-ing, and Dennis must see this, because he follows it up with, “Not in, like, a gay way or anything. Just— we can rub it in their faces. It’s New Year’s, dude, it doesn’t even count.” Thirty-one seconds. Thirty-one seconds for him to make a decision.

“Alright, yeah,” Mac says. Thirty seconds left. It’s a little pathetic that he decided that fast, but he can blame it on the weed. He takes a puff off the burned-down blunt, hoping it’ll calm his nerves. “It doesn’t count.”

“Nice,” Dennis says. “How much longer?”

“Twenty-four seconds.”

“What about now?”

“Twenty-one.”

“What about—”

“Dude, I’ll start counting when it hits ten, okay?”

“Fine. Christ.”

_ “Thank _ you.”

“How about—”

“Let’s just— twelve!”

“Eleven!”

They start counting in unison, “Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One!” and Mac’s “Happy New Year” disappears into Dennis’s mouth before it can even get all the way out. He can feel Dennis’s hand coming to rest on his jaw, his thumb barely stroking the bottom of Mac’s cheekbone, and Mac lets his lips part just the tiniest bit. Dennis takes it as an invitation, just like Mac knew he would, and his tongue slips along Mac’s bottom lip. Mac can hear the crowd roar upstairs and belatedly realizes that they were two seconds too early, but he’s got Dennis’s face cupped in his hands right now and what’s going on upstairs doesn’t concern the two of them. Mac moans a little, and if Dennis is weirded out by that, it doesn’t come across in the kiss. The Feeling is spreading through Mac’s body, concentrating in the places where Dennis touches him, stronger than anything he’s ever felt when he’s kissing a girl, and there’s something stirring deep in his gut—

_ Shit. _

Mac practically rips himself away from Dennis, his thumbs trailing across Dennis’s cheekbones as he does, and he shakes his head. “I’m— that was—  _ gay, _ I’m not—”

“Dude,” Dennis says, looking positively  _ debauched, _ “I know you’re not gay. But what happens down here stays down here, right?”

Dennis’s gaze is brittle and far too sharp. His lips curve up into the slightest of smirks. Mac is suddenly, irrevocably sure that Dennis could bring him to pieces if given the chance.

That would be gay. That would definitely— that would be a sin, one of the worst sins of them all, and there is no way in hell that Mac would let Dennis— let  _ any _ guy—

“I’m gonna— y’know—” Mac hooks his thumb over at the door, a rush of nervous energy flowing through him. “Yeah.”

“You know where to find me,” Dennis says, that same half-smirk still painted on his face.

“Don’t tell anyone about this,” Mac replies, and Dennis’s expression falters for a half-second. Maybe he’s thinking about how God would punish this, if it were real, if the Feeling were something other than hate. Maybe he’s thinking of eternal damnation. Maybe he’s thinking of doing it all over again. Mac sure as fuck is.


End file.
